1159 textmate how to

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TextMate How-To

Over 20 fast and furious timesaving recipes for
using TextMate efficiently and effectively

Chris Mears

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

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TextMate How-To
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the
publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the
information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without
warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers
and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly
or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the
companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals.
However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: October 2012

Production Reference: 1191012

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84969-398-1
www.packtpub.com

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Credits
Author

Project Coordinator

Chris Mears

Shraddha Bagadia
Proofreader

Reviewers

Aaron Nash

Shifra Pride Raffel
Simone Silvestroni

Production Coordinator
Prachali Bhiwandkar

Acquisition Editor
Kartikey Pandey

Cover Work

Commissioning Editor

Prachali Bhiwandkar

Priyanka Shah
Technical Editor
Dominic Pereira

Cover Work
Conidon Miranda

Copy Editor
Aditya Nair

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About the Author
Chris Mears lives in San Francisco and is the lead web developer at Canned Banners, a

startup he co-founded. Though he considers himself a generalist when it comes to technology,
he finds true passion developing for the Web. When he's not thinking and dreaming about

code, he enjoys going to concerts, practicing on his guitar, homebrewing beer, and tea
snobbery. This is his first book.
I'd like to thank Anna for her support and the proofreading she performed
throughout the writing of this book. I'd like to thank my friends and family
(and the family of my friends), who have given me words of encouragement.
Last, but certainly not least, I'd like to thank my friend and past colleague,
Shifra, for being a great technical editor and also fixing all of my
grammatical mistakes.

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About the Reviewers
Shifra Pride Raffel is a Java developer in the Bay Area. She has been developing software
for 14 years, has worked as an Agile software development process consultant for Pivotal
Labs, and currently works for MSCI in Berkeley (her technical reviewing of this book reflected
only her opinion and not that of MSCI).

Simone Silvestroni is a multidisciplinary designer and developer, working in web UI for
12 years. He is based in Milan and London.

Starting as a print designer and desktop publisher in 1993, he crossed through different
creative and technical fields closely related to web designing and coding. His key skill is
turning raw sketched ideas into live interfaces, and studying and modifying them through
user tests while always keeping a keen eye on accessibility and typography.
Simone is also a graduated musician, a sound designer, and a bassist.
He worked for the biggest publishing company in Italy (RCS) for several years, joined a startup
in February 2000, and became a team leader of the sound and web designing team and
remained so until the end of 2004, working on the prototype for a PlayStation 2 platform game.
He co-founded his own company in 2004 and co-ran it until the end of 2007, when he joined

a full-service web agency and led the user experience team for four years. After relocating
to London, UK, he joined a leading online gaming company, eventually co-founding his new
startup, UI Farm Ltd, a small UI and UX agency focused on responsive design and riding the
incoming mobile wave.

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Table of Contents
Preface
TextMate How-To

Configuring TextMate (Must know)
Installing themes (Must know)
Quickly navigating to text (Must know)
Converting text (Must know)
Moving and aligning text (Should know)
Manipulating multiple lines and columns of text (Should know)
Finding and replacing text (Must know)
Folding (Should know)
Bookmarking (Should know)
Creating projects (Must know)

Utilizing tabs (Must know)
Traversing files (Should know)
Finding text in a project (Must know)
Installing bundles with GetBundles (Must know)
Learning and loving bundles (Must know)
Making a TODO list (Should know)
Becoming a Zen Coding master (Should know)
Blogging more efficiently (Should know)
Markdown and Textile (Should know)
Using macros (Should know)
Executing shell commands (Become an expert)

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5

5
8
11
14
15
17
19
22
24
25
28
29
32

37
41
43
47
49
51
55
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Preface
TextMate is a highly extensible Mac OS X GUI text editor that has gained quite a bit of
developer notoriety through the years. Created in 2004 by Allan Odgaard, TextMate 1
started out as a simple editor. By 2006, when TextMate 1.5 was released, it won the
Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool, and has gained a vast community backing.
In August 2012, TextMate 2 was released under GNU General Public License and its source
code is available at Github. However, this guide will cover the most popular version of the
software, TextMate 1.5.
The goal of this book is to provide its readers a succinct set of recipes to become familiar
with TextMate's most useful features and bundles, in order to hit the ground running and
code more quickly and efficiently.

What this book covers
Configuring TextMate, guides you through the most common configuration topics so you can
customize your TextMate experience quickly.
Installing themes, covers downloading and installing themes to personalize your document
window and code coloring.

Quickly navigating to text, demonstrates how to navigate the text and document quickly and
easily with keyboard shortcuts.
Converting text, provides an overview of the most common built-in text conversions that will
speed up your editing.
Moving and aligning text, walks you through how to move and align text in your document.
Manipulating multiple lines and columns of text, provides a very useful recipe for editing
multiple lines of text at the same time.

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Preface
Finding and replacing text, demonstrates TextMate's extremely powerful Find and
Replace functionality.
Folding, teaches you how to use Folding to organize code.
Bookmarking, walks you through using bookmarks to quickly navigate to important lines.
Creating projects, covers creating and saving projects through various methods, including
opening directories, dragging-and-dropping, and using the command line.
Utilizing tabs, runs you through the various ways to navigate tabs, mostly via keyboard shortcuts.
Traversing files, teaches you how to quickly and easily open files within a project without
reaching for the mouse.
Finding text in a project, describes another way to find text, this time searching through your
entire project. This task will also include some tips on how to speed up your search and even
cover some caveats for larger projects.
Installing bundles with GetBundles, covers the finding and installation of bundles with
GetBundles, which is a bundle that allows you to install other publicly available bundles.
Learning and loving bundles, quickly describes the use of bundles, including the beauty of
tab completions and how to easily find the bundle item you're looking for along with the tab
completion abbreviation or the keyboard shortcut.
Making a TODO list, utilizes the official TextMate TODO bundle to display a to-do list compiled

directly from your project using common comment keywords such as TODO, FIXME, CHANGED,
and RADAR.
Becoming a Zen Coding master, demonstrates the Zen Coding philosophy and use of the most
common bundle items.
Blogging more efficiently, describes how to use a few of the more useful blogging bundles
(Blogging and Hyperlink Helper) in order to work more efficiently when offline.
Markdown and Textile, covers both text formats and describes why you may want to use one
over the other depending on your project.
Using macros, provides an overview on how to record and subsequently execute macros in
your document to speed up common tasks.
Executing shell commands, demonstrates how to run shell commands directly from the
current document.

What you need for this book
This How-To guide is for users with a basic understanding of TextMate. You should have
TextMate 1.5.x installed.
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Preface

Who this book is for
This book is geared toward beginner and intermediate web developers and designers who
want to speed up their coding. Though TextMate can also work very well as a plain text editor,
some experience with a programming or scripting language, whether it's HTML, CSS, PHP, or
Ruby, is helpful to understand the depth to some of the examples provided.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of
information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The .tmbundle file will open as a project."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles.

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in
menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button
moves you to the next screen".
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Preface

Customer support
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Errata
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happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the
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Questions
You can contact us at if you are having a problem with any
aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.

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TextMate How-To
TextMate is an extremely powerful and highly extensible GUI text editor for Mac OS X. Since
its release in 2004, it has garnered a huge community of supporters, won awards, and is
considered one of the best coding platforms on the Mac for web developers, designers, and
serious programmers. This How-To will guide you through the best techniques to hit the ground
running and code like a professional.

Configuring TextMate (Must know)
This task will quickly go through some of the more helpful configuration options, including
some Preference and View settings. Note that these settings are purely my preferences and
are only meant to show where to find them. You should set up TextMate however you feel
comfortable, and based upon your particular project.

How to do it...
To configure Line Numbers:
1. From the menu, select View | Gutter | Line Numbers (Option + Command + L)
to toggle them on and off.
To configure Soft Tabs:
1. From the status bar, located at the bottom of the document window, click on
the Tab Size pop-up menu, and select Soft Tabs.
2. From the same pop-up menu, select the desired tab size (usually 2 or 4).

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TextMate How-To
To configure Soft Wrap:
1. From the menu, select View | Soft Wrap (Option + Command + W).

2. To choose the width of the wrap, from the menu select View | Wrap Column.
Selecting Use Window Frame will change the wrap width depending on the overall
width of the document window.
To configure the Show Invisibles option:
1. From the menu, select View | Show Invisibles (Option + Command + I). Two
examples are shown in the following screenshot:

To configure Check Spelling as You Type:
1. From the menu, select Edit | Spelling | Check Spelling as You Type (Option +
Command + ;).
Selecting Highlight current line, Show right margin indicator, and Highlight right margin:
1. From the menu, select TextMate | Preferences (Command + ,).
2. In Preferences, under the General tab, check Highlight current line, Show right
margin indicator, and Highlight right margin.

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TextMate How-To

How it works...
Now, let's go through why you may want to use these settings:
ff

Line Numbers: They are helpful to establish where you are in a document. If
you'd rather have fewer margin distractions, then you can also determine your
cursor's current line and column position in the status bar at the bottom of the
document window.

ff

Soft Tabs: Soft tabs versus hard tabs are somewhat controversial (do a Google
search and you'll see). You should really use what you're most comfortable with or
what conforms to the project or document style rules.

ff

Soft Wrap: This will wrap lines based on your margin column width settings. If this is
not set and there's a line that goes beyond the document window's view, scrolling will
be necessary to view the rest of the line.

ff

Show Invisibles: This will show tabs and line returns. Sometimes, this is helpful for
troubleshooting some oddities in your document, such as why a tab isn't lining up
properly. They are also helpful to get a complete picture of your code. However, if you
would rather not have the clutter, it's perfectly reasonable to turn this setting off.

ff

Check Spelling as You Type: This will provide the familiar wiggly red line under
misspelled words. Right-clicking on the words will provide alternate word options.
It's only necessary when composing written words, but TextMate is smart enough to
determine when you're writing code and won't try to spell check everything.

ff

Highlight current line: This will provide a horizontal highlight to indicate in which

line your cursor is located. The right margin indicator option will provide a vertical
line to indicate the right margin, and the Highlight right margin option will highlight
the right margin. These visual indicators, or ornaments, will help show you where
your cursor is in the document, as well as where the right margin is located. Knowing
where the right margin is can be helpful for keeping code readable and well styled.
For example, if some of your fellow coders are accessing the files via shell editors
(that is, vim, emacs, nano, and so on), they may have limited document width based
on their particular terminal program.

There's more...
Included with the TextMate application is a command-line tool, which can be used in Terminal
to open files. In addition, it's quite important to learn the keyboard shortcuts, which will help
you do things quickly and efficiently. However, in order to learn the shortcuts, it is vital to learn
what the keyboard symbols look like.

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TextMate How-To

Enhanced Terminal Usage
When you run TextMate for the first time, you will be prompted to install the shell command
mate. Installing this tool will allow you to open files into TextMate from Terminal, for example,
mate example.html or mate project/. There is more on opening files in the Traversing
files recipe.

You can open the install dialog at any time from the menu; select Help | Terminal Usage.

Keyboard shortcuts
TextMate is most powerful when you use keyboard shortcuts as opposed to reaching for the
mouse and selecting menu items. This How-To will try to provide the keyboard shortcuts for as
many of the functions as possible.

Installing themes (Must know)
Though it doesn't do much for the actual usage of the application, themes and code coloring
will help with understanding and interpretation of any text or code you'll be dealing with.
TextMate comes with a number of themes already installed (accessible via Preferences), but
if you can't find one that suits your particular tastes, this task will go through downloading and
installing a theme, specifically the popular and freely available RailsCasts theme.

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TextMate How-To

Getting ready
Download the ZIP file at This is shown
in the following screenshot:

How to do it...
Once the ZIP file is downloaded, extract it and double-click on the theme files which have the
.tmTheme extension to install and switch to the theme. The theme files are shown in the
following screenshot:

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TextMate How-To

How it works...
Made famous by Ryan Bates' screencasts (), RailsCasts is a
great and aesthetically pleasing theme that can be used for a number of languages, including
PHP, Ruby, HTML, and JavaScript.
You will notice that the RailsCasts theme ZIP file contains two versions. The one labeled
ryan-light.tmTheme has a white background. The original has a dark background and is
also the version used for most of the screenshots in this guide. Whichever you choose to
use is purely your preference, but there is no harm in installing and trying both.
You can switch themes by going to File | Preferences (Command + ,) and selecting the
Fonts & Colors tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

There's more...
In case the included or RailsCasts theme doesn't adhere to your particular tastes, there are
many other popular themes available.

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TextMate How-To

Solarized theme
Another freely available theme is called Solarized, and can be found at https://github.
com/deplorableword/textmate-solarized. The Solarized theme is stated to be

specifically useful on calibrated and non-calibrated displays alike, as well as in a variety of
lighting conditions. Since the theme consists of a simple color palette, it's easily translatable
to terminal emulations and therefore highly versatile between applications.

You can find out more about the Solarized theme, including themes for additional
applications, at />
More themes!
There are many more themes available on the Macromates wiki:
/>
Quickly navigating to text (Must know)
This task will show you how to navigate the document and text, in most cases without
reaching for the mouse or track pad.

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TextMate How-To

How to do it...
The two available options to quickly navigate to the text are as follows:
ff

Go to Line... will move your cursor to the specified line number. From the menu,
select Navigation | Go to Line… (Command + L).

ff

Go to Symbol... will move your cursor to the beginning of a function, method, or other

symbol. From the menu, select Navigation | Go to Symbol… (Shift + Command + T).

How it works...
Go to Line... (Command + L) is very useful for situations where you know the precise line you
want to edit. For example, when you're debugging some code and the error message code
gives the problem line number.
Go to Symbol... (Shift + Command + T) is mainly used for programming languages such as
JavaScript and PHP, where functions or methods are defined in the document. When this is
invoked, a window will appear with the names of the functions or methods available, as shown
in the following screenshot:

Start entering the method name and it will match and filter the list based on what you enter.
Go to Symbol... (Shift + Command + T) is extremely helpful for long documents of code where
scrolling and navigating line by line is unreasonable.
You can also open the function pop up in the status menu (located at the bottom of the
document window) to display all of the functions or methods in your document. This is shown
in the following screenshot:

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TextMate How-To

There's more...
Along with the quick navigation shortcuts, there are also ways to move the cursor and scroll
the document easily without using the mouse.

Cursor movement

The following keyboard shortcuts will move your cursor:
Shortcut

Description

Shift + F

One character forward.

Shift + B

One character backward.

Shift + P

Up one line.

Shift + N

Down one line.

Shift + A

Beginning of line.

Shift + E

End of line.

Option + right arrow

Right one word (Mac convention).

Option + left arrow

Left one word (Mac convention).

Note that the first four movements can be accomplished by using the arrow keys, but
sometimes it's faster to keep your fingers on the keyboard home row.

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TextMate How-To

Scrolling the document without moving the cursor
In the situation where you want to take a peek within the document without moving the
cursor, you can use the keyboard shortcut Command + Option + Control plus the arrow keys.
For example, to scroll up, you would press Command + Option + Control + up arrow. Your
cursor will stay put and you can go back to it by using the Command + J (that is, select Edit |
Find | Jump to Selection) keyboard shortcut.

Converting text (Must know)
This task will demonstrate how to convert text in various ways.

How to do it...
TextMate provides the following text conversions:
ff

Uppercase: This will convert the entire selected text to uppercase letters. From the
menu, select Text | Convert | to Uppercase (Control + U).

ff

Lowercase: This will convert the entire selected text to lowercase letters. From the
menu, select Text | Convert | to Lowercase (Control + Shift + U).

ff

Title case: This will convert the first letter of each word in the selection to uppercase.
From the menu, select Text | Convert | to Title case (Option + Control + U).

ff

Opposite case: This will swap the case of each letter of the selection (for example,
lowercase will become uppercase and uppercase will become lowercase). From the
menu, select Text | Convert | to Opposite case (Control + G).

ff

Spaces to Tabs: This will convert spaces to tabs (as defined in Tab Size). From the
menu, select Text | Convert | Spaces to Tabs.

ff

Tabs to Spaces: This will convert tabs to spaces (as defined in Tab Size). From the
menu, select Text | Convert | Tabs to Spaces.

ff

Transpose: This will output the selection backwards. From the menu, select Text |
Convert | Transpose (Control + T).

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TextMate How-To

How it works...
Most of these conversions should be self-explanatory. Some text conversions are shown in the
following screenshot:

Tabs to Spaces (or Spaces to Tabs) is helpful if you decide later on to change to or from Soft
Tabs. It's also useful if you want to play a practical joke on a colleague who is vehemently
against either soft or hard tabs.

Moving and aligning text (Should know)
This task will show you how to move text around, whether you want to move a selection of text
up, down, or align it.

How to do it...
The different options used to move and align text are as follows:
ff

Moving a selection up a line will insert the selected text into the previous line. From
the menu, select Text | Move Selection | Line Up (Command + Control + up arrow).

ff

Moving a selection down a line will insert the selected text into the next line. From
the menu, select Text | Move Selection | Line Down (Command + Control +
down arrow).

ff

Left aligning will align text to the left. From the menu, select Text | Align | Left.

ff

Right aligning will align text to the right margin based on the Wrap Column setting.
From the menu, select Text | Align | Right.

ff

Center aligning will center text using the Wrap Column setting as a guide. From the
menu, select Text | Align | Center.

ff

Justifying will space out the text evenly using the Wrap Column setting as a guide.
From the menu, select Text | Align | Justify.

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TextMate How-To

How it works...
Moving selections: When you are moving a selection of text, it is just as if you are dragging
the text around with your mouse cursor (see Moving text with the mouse/track pad in the
There's more… section). Don't be afraid. As you'll see in the following screenshot, it will not
overwrite the line you are moving your selection to:

Aligning text: An important thing to note is that the alignment is based on the Wrap Column
size (select View | Wrap Column).

There's more...
Since TextMate is a full-featured GUI text editor, you may also move text with the mouse or
track pad. Plus, we'll look at a tip for moving entire lines up or down.

Moving text with the mouse/track pad
You can also move the text around by clicking and dragging a selection with your mouse or
track pad, just like most other word processors. However, keeping your hands on the keyboard
is faster and reduces repetitive strain (that is, carpal tunnel syndrome), and is typically
preferred by hardcore coders.

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